Few books better demonstrate the evolution of the field of
spaceflight history than Valerie Neal’s book Spaceflight in the Shuttle Era and Beyond. In 1981, a group of historians gathered for a
seminar at the National Air and Space Museum to consider the state of their
discipline. These scholars agreed that
with a few exceptions, most authors who had written books on spaceflight
history to that point were consumed with technical details and did not consider
broader social and cultural themes. These
authors were more interested in exploring the intricacies of the Saturn V rocket propellants and engines,
for instance, than in exploring what a machine like the Saturn V meant for the society that constructed it. Scholars over the next two decades, realizing
that the former approach provided too narrow a view of their field, strove to
integrate the latter approach until the organizers of a 2006 conference agreed
that they had developed to an impressive extent a “new aerospace history…that
moves beyond an overriding concern for the details of the artifact.”[1] As the holder of an M.A. and Ph.D. in
American Studies before she began her job as a National Air and Space Museum
curator in 1989, Valerie Neal is a natural choice to examine the cultural
dimensions of spaceflight and not simply the technical details. Neal seeks to add knowledge to spaceflight
that goes beyond what would interest an engineer who works on a space vehicle
and instead engage a broader audience, therefore fitting into the “new
aerospace history.”

Neal explores in this book how NASA
officials and the media interpreted the meaning of spaceflight during the Space
Shuttle era, finding that these entities attempted to frame this era around the
pragmatic vision of routine commuting to Earth orbit but found this meaning
contested as the years passed. From 1969
to 1972, twelve Americans had set foot on the Moon. Neal finds that two cultural narratives had
helped to sustain support for Apollo lunar
exploration: the idea that Americans should continue to explore the frontier in
the tradition of westward expansion that had marked the nation’s history, and
the idea that Americans should prevail in a heroic contest against an adversary
(the Soviet Union during the Cold War “space race”). Yet after Apollo
11, support for further moon landings waned. This meant that human spaceflight needed a
new rationale to maintain public support.
Neal devotes her book to explaining the formation of that new rationale
and its transformations through the 21st century. President Richard Nixon laid the foundation
of the post-Apollo era in human
spaceflight by approving the Space Shuttle project in 1972. This meant that future astronauts would
travel not a quarter of a million miles to the Moon, but to Earth orbit aboard
this massive winged ship. Since these
astronauts would not be exploring new territory, the Nixon administration, NASA
officials and the media framed the meaning of spaceflight as instead exploiting
Earth orbit. Like workers commuting to
an office, astronauts would routinely commute to Earth orbit to bring practical
benefits to their society, from the deployment and repair of satellites, to
laboratory experiments yielding new knowledge into life and materials science,
to the construction of a space station.
The vehicle would also carry women, African-Americans, and Hispanics who
would carry out tasks that went beyond piloting the vehicle, thereby making the
astronaut corps more diverse than the community of white male test pilots it
had been during the 1960s. In the
tradition of a cultural studies scholar, Neal argues that these ideas amounted
to the imaginary, or “broad common understanding that permeates a society and
makes sense of its norms and practices,” that marked the Space Shuttle era.[2]
She draws upon an impressive variety of sources to support this argument,
citing the speeches and publications that NASA officials produced to frame the
meaning of the Shuttle era, including sources available in archival collections
in Washington, D.C. and Houston. But she
does not confine herself only to NASA sources; she also examines the influence
of news coverage, editorials, and even cartoons in shaping public opinion. For instance, cartoonists depicted the Space
Shuttle as a “You-Haul” truck and made this a visual icon that highlighted the
meaning of the shuttle as a practical and routine commuter vehicle.

However, Neal also makes a considerable
case that the media contested this framing of meaning. After the first launch of Columbia in 1981, for example, New York Times writers frequently
reported on the technical glitches that delayed flights and eliminated any hope
that the vehicle could fly frequently enough or deliver enough services to pay
for itself. Though NASA released
colorful booklets explaining the benefits of the scientific research done on Spacelab shuttle missions, which Neal
analyzes as part of her exploration of the visual rhetoric of meaning,
editorialists and scientists often questioned the scientific productivity of
the vehicle and argued that unmanned vehicles had accomplished almost all of
the important science in space. The
shocking destruction of Challenger and
the loss of its seven astronauts on January 28, 1986, brought to the forefront
severe reservations that the shuttle could ever make space travel routine, as
well as the arguments that NASA needed a new goal worthy of human spaceflight
or that unmanned vehicles should travel into space rather than astronauts. Though the program recovered after the Challenger disaster, the loss of Columbia and seven more astronauts on
February 1, 2003, brought the same questions from the media. Similarly, Neal devotes several chapters to
media criticism of NASA’s proposed space station (endorsed by President Ronald
Reagan in 1984 but not occupied by a crew until 2000 and not completed until
2011) and plans to send humans beyond Earth orbit that fizzled in the 1980s,
1990s, and 2000s. Thus, by the end of
the book, Neal has mustered an enormous array of evidence to support her
assertion that “reality proved to be a much harder thing to control than the
optimists who launched a new era in spaceflight ever anticipated.”[3]

This book deserves a large audience
because, as a cultural studies document, it has the potential to engage
scholars not traditionally associated with spaceflight history. The merging of cultural studies and human
spaceflight is still a fairly recent phenomenon; Neal’s fellow National Air and
Space Museum curator Michael Neufeld notes that this “did not emerge until the
end of the 1990s.”[4]
This underscores the need for scholars
like Neal to show how cultural history can be drawn into the web of spaceflight
history, a much narrower domain. For
those scholars who do not specialize in spaceflight history, the book should
attract interest because the ideas of framing, construction of meaning, and
memory are applicable to a wide variety of historical topics. For those scholars who do specialize in
spaceflight, this book offers the most thorough treatment of the cultural
understanding of the Space Shuttle era yet attempted and will hopefully inform
the creation of new cultural understandings as astronauts continue to soar
beyond Earth.

Essays in History

Established in 1954, Essays in History is the annual publication of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. EiH publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of historical inquiry, as well as reviews of the most recent scholarship. EiH serves as a resource to students, teachers, researchers, and enthusiasts of historical studies.